Hummingbird Advice

[larahill]

We are looking for actionable insights about how to recover from hummingbird. I read the post that suggested checking the Google Webmaster Tools "Manual Action" tab for a notice about unnatural links. I did this and there was no notice. So what other steps can we take to troubleshoot?

[joseph.chambers]

http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguintool/ offers a cool overlay of your organic traffic.. and offers a good insight to see how you were effected by each known update.

Now from recovering. This will cost you money but you can recover in less then 2 weeks in my experience but its going to cost you about $600 in just tools plus about 300 or so in link removals.

http://www.linkresearchtools.com/products-overview/ - you need the superhero plan. Looking here they have a October sale which saves you a little over 100 bucks. Cool so there is 400 bucks. Next: http://www.rmoov.com/ go get this for a month. Its a 100 bucks. Now what you want to do is go through and run their detox tool. Get the ones that are not indexed and the toxic ones.

Open up both excel spreadsheets and copy the pages that are linking to you. Open a new excel sheet remove duplicate rows or if you want to do it quick you can just use http://textmechanic.com/Remove-Duplicate-Lines.html

Next you take your list of URLs and run that through rmoov. Next it will do its thing go through the campaign settings and check Add Report Back Link to Webmaster Email & FlipFlop Emails. FlipFlop Emails basically sends one time to one email for that domain if it found more then one - it will send next time to that one.

Once it finds all the contact information what you want to do next is go through and enter the campaign. There is a Show Problems checkbox. See what ones are missing contact info. Some of these are going to be tough to find so you will have to delete some of them but; please.. take your time and try to find out who it is. Sometimes its just as doing a whois again.. and you will see that they have a name or another domain you can google to dig deeper.

Now what you're going to want to do is go through each one of these and make sure there are no bad links here.. just make a triple spot check and qualify them. Sometimes the most I had to remove 4 or 5 but Im glad I did. Sometimes you will find that the links it found was just a different view of the same link. So you can just go there and clean it up.

Next what you want to do is send out the campaign email. What this basically does is sends out a email every single day to these guys until they remove it. I found that sometimes the webmaster doesnt even reply but just deletes them and if it goes though and sees that its a deadlink, win. You will get people asking from 3 bucks to 25.. I found that saying: if I disavow you - it doesnt help One guy just raised the price. Just pay them. I found a lot of people who have these directory networks and he found 1000s of directory links he could remove. That can get costly - I just make a note ( rmoov has a good note taker for each site ) and if they want 3000 bucks, screw them, disavow and thanks for the list.

After you run that for a week. Take the clean disavow and upload that. Next - run that campaign again and while thats running you can submit your notes in your reconsideration requests. I talked to so and so, I paid this and this is when. I even add paypal transaction ids. The next thing you can do is when your replying to the web masters is use the note system in rmoov, and when they remove it, and you check, click the link thats in the email which reports back to rmoov that its removed.

Now - I see that once you submit your reconsideration request it takes about 8 business days to get back. Everytime I do this ( more then once ) I get a email saying the manual action has been revoked.

Now that you have a list of what links you removed. Right? Now Im sure you have a link indexing service or a tool that does it.. run that to the ones thats been removed. Im not sure how much this step helps but we all know that the disavow list that you have it takes some time for google-bot to run through this and recheck and do what it does. So to speed up a speedy recovery, I do that.

At the end of the day, end your subscription with rmoov and just let it run for the rest of the month and you may get people mad and they just remove the links so you stop emailing them. So keep a eye on the email and you can get some more wins from it.

This got a little too long. Im sorry. When you do something so many times its easy to talk about.

[crackingmedia]

Hi Lara

This isn't a Hummingbird issue. From the sound of it, you may have been hit by Penguin 2.1.

To start with you may find it helpful to read this article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/penguin-2-1-changed-since-2-0-recover/72977/

Peter